Unusual Twists on Nonprofit Fundraising

Print newsletters are the default communications tactic for nonprofits.But other elements can yield tremendous benefits for nonprofits, as well.

If the goal is community engagement and advocacy, you might produce an annual report or a community report card. If the goal is promotional, you might use postcards, flyers, invitations and event programs. If you want to get in front of new donors, you might consider integrating alternative techniques that gain attention in fresh and surprisingly ways.

What are some of those alternative techniques?

Table tents: Table tents can be powerful tools. Develop a creative tagline to communicate your distinctive competence, then illustrate how the reader can help. Distribute tents in high-traffic areas where people have a minute to read your message, such as restaurant and retail counters. 

Hang tags: Partner with a grocer or retailer to place hang tags on popular products. The association with a well-known brand gives your organization instant credibility. 

“Gift” catalogs: Give benefactors a tangible idea of how donations are being used. A hunger relief organization might “sell” cereal, bread, or a family dinner, with “prices” corresponding to the cost of supplying these items to those in need. World Vision’s Christmas 2014 Gift Catalog allowed supporters to purchase goats, chickens, and ducks for Third World communities to provide both sustainable food sources and merchant opportunities.

These are not products we normally see associated with nonprofits donations, and that’s what makes them so effective. It takes more than clever advertisements to inspire your stakeholders to action. It takes creativity, too.

But beware of using these alternative techniques in a silo-ed fashion. Integrate them into an overall marketing strategy. Include measurable outcomes to keep your staff focused and results-driven. By building in accountability, you will ensure that your board members become your most ardent marketing allies.

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be 'meetings.”
― Dave Barry

Elements of a Successful Cross-Media Campaign

Want to energize your print campaign? Add demographic or psychographic segmentation and personalization. Want to energize your print campaign even more? Combine print with other media to amplify its effect.

The most common cross-media campaigns these days are print and e-mail, but you might also want to consider banner ads, social media, SMS text messaging, search engine advertising and other avenues that complement print. Each will have different uses and benefits, depending on your marketing goals and the target demographic you are trying to reach.

Here are some basic rules to keep in mind:

1. Consistent branding across all media.

Different media have different requirements and limitations, so you aren’t going to be able to maintain 100% consistency all the time. But whenever possible, try to use the same images, color schemes, messaging and other elements across media.

2. Strategic application of media.

Know what role, specifically, each medium is supposed to play. If you are going to combine e-mail with print, what are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to “prime the pump” for the print piece? Are you using e-mail as a follow-up? Maybe if you’re driving traffic to a campaign-specific website, you might want to consider Internet banner advertising in demographic “hot spots.” The key is to match the medium to the audience and the message so that each medium plays off the other’s strengths.

3. Appropriate matching of media to the audience.

Ensure that you use the right medium to communicate with each target audience. Not all media are appropriate for every demographic. You’re not going to reach many senior citizens with SMS, for example. Plus, the mix is always changing. For example, only teenagers and college students used to use Facebook, but increasingly professionals and businesses use it as well.

Identify your marketing objectives, and then ensure that each medium is the right one to accomplish those goals. Make sure that you match the medium to your demographic and your offer, and use it appropriately within the best practices of that medium.

There is a learning curve associated with multi-channel marketing, but the ability to amplify and reinforce your marketing message can be invaluable.

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

Business is a game, played for fantastic stakes, and you're in competition with experts. If you want to win, you have to learn to be a master of the game.
― Sidney Sheldon, Master of the Game

Highlight Color Brings in the Dollars

While color is a powerhouse in any type of marketing, you don’t always have to use four-color process to improve your response rates. In fact, the State of California Franchise Tax Board (FTB) shows that strategically placed highlight color can result in huge bottom line benefits, too.

The California FTB produces more than 14 million personal income tax returns each year. It used to send out standard tax notices, but it found that many taxpayers found them confusing. Taxpayers didn’t know what they needed to do, how much to pay, or where to send the payment.  The result was slow payments and expensive volumes of calls to FTB’s call centers.

The FTB decided to do something different. It added highlight color to its contact letters and personalized its messaging to explain exactly what action each taxpayer needed to take. Key information was displayed in blue, guiding recipients through the document and giving them specific instructions.

The result? Faster payments and fewer mistakes. This translated into millions in additional interest income and, at an average cost of $15 per call to the call center, significant savings from reduced call center contacts.

The takeaway? Color boosts your profitability, not just in your graphics, but in your messaging, too. Let us help you make strategic decisions about how to use color to make you money and save you money, too! 

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

The first one gets the oyster the second gets the shell. – Andrew Carnegie

Can Boosting Response Rates Be This Simple?

When marketers think about successful 1:1 campaigns, they think about factors such as the creative, the offer, the mailing list, and the selection of 1:1 variables. But there is another, even simpler step that you can take to boost response rates.

Provide multiple response mechanisms. Yes, it’s that simple. Give people options. Not everyone wants to respond to your marketing campaign in the same way. One person might feel very comfortable responding by email. Another might prefer to respond by phone. Yet another might prefer to respond to a personalized URL.

Consider your audience. A twenty-something sipping coffee in Starbucks might not respond to a tear-out form, but she might be willing to pick up her phone (which is probably sitting right next to her coffee) and scan a QR Code, taking her to a mobile website. But if you’re marketing to retirees, you might want to include a tear-out form and an 800 number instead, even if you’re primarily hoping they’ll go to the Web.

Testing different response mechanisms is a great opportunity to learn about the different demographic groups in your database, too. One marketer got a surprise when it offered recipients the opportunity to respond to the survey using a personalized URL or by filling out a tear-out card. It thought tear-out cards had become outdated, but it found a surprisingly high percentage of the cards returned, many of them from older recipients who were not comfortable giving out certain information online.

So when you are planning your campaign, include detailed consideration of the response mechanisms you provide. Test different methods with different demographic groups. Once people respond, add this as a variable in your database and capitalize on this knowledge the next time around.

Need help? Give us a call!

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

Opportunities don't happen, you create them. 

~Chris Grosser

Using Google Analytics to Track Your Progress

If it was your New Year’s resolution to improve the effectiveness of your marketing, how do you determine if it’s working? Since one of the benefits of 1:1 print marketing is the ability to drive traffic to your website, one of the ways to determine success is to use Google Analytics and similar tools to monitor your Web activity.

Online analytics tools are about more than the number of visitors to your site. They can tell you where these visitors are coming from, how long they stay, which sites or search engines are driving the most traffic, and more.

In addition to basic site traffic, let’s look at some of the metrics Google Analytics offers.

• Absolute unique visits. Number of individual visitors (as contrasted with people who might be visiting the site more than once).
• Page views / average page views. When people come to your site, how many pages do they click on before they leave?
• Time on site. Once people hit your site, how long do they stay? Are they taking the time to read the content? Or clicking out right away?
• Traffic sources. Where are your visitors coming from? Are they typing in your URL directly? Coming from referring sites? Search engines? If the latter, which ones? What keywords are they using?
• Page navigation. Did people land on each page directly? Or did they click through another page to get there? After viewing the content, did they click through to more pages? Or leave the site?

What can you learn from this type of information?

If you’re running a specific 1:1 printing campaign, for example, you can watch how effective it is for driving website traffic—how quickly traffic peaks and how high.

Once people land on your main URL, if they leave without clicking through to other pages, it might tell you that you need to improve the relevance of your index page or make the content more compelling.

If you know the keywords being used to drive the most traffic from search engines, you can use this information in your SEO (search engine optimization) efforts.

If you track which pages people are landing on or clicking through most often, you can add content or links to those pages to maximize your message.

You make a significant investment in 1:1 print marketing, so maximize every dollar you spend. Once you’ve driven people to your website, free metrics tools can help you sharpen your message and improve site relevance, navigation, and functionality. You will capture more site visitors, hold them, and ultimately drive more conversion to sales. 

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

Letting your customers set your standards is a dangerous game,
because the race to the bottom is pretty easy to win.
Setting your own standards, and living up to them,
is a better way to profit. Not to mention a better way
to make your day worth all the effort you put into it.
-Seth Godin

What’s Your Brand Identity?

What is your company’s brand identity? Do you even know? Whether you realize it or not, all of the choices you make, from the colors on your business card to the graphics on your mailer, create a brand identity in the eyes of your customers and prospects. Let’s look at a few of the brand elements you should be paying attention to.

Color. The colors you choose for your marketing materials should reinforce your brand. Think UPS brown, IBM blue, and John Deere green. Color triggers an emotional reaction, so color is a powerful tool. Red elicits excitement. Blue is associated with faithfulness and trustworthiness. Black connotes luxury. What colors best represent you?

Image. Your presentation should be consistent with your industry. If your business is in a conservative field, such as accounting or financial planning, for example, your visual image should be businesslike. Would you trust your money to someone who gives you a florescent orange business card covered with cheap clip art and grunge fonts?

Distinctive. Your colors and logo imagery should be appropriate, but at the same time distinctive so they stand out from the crowd. “Distinctive” doesn’t mean complicated. In fact, many of the most recognizable logos are simple. Think about the McDonald's Golden Arches or the Nike "swoosh."

Quality. When you are producing your print materials, spend the extra money to produce high-quality work. You can talk about quality products and great customer service, but if your print marketing looks like it was done on the cheap, that is the image that will stick in your customers’ memories. Spend the extra money on “extras” like gloss coatings and heavier-weight paper when appropriate.

Once you have a solid handle on your brand image, be consistent. Whether it’s your business card, your corporate identity materials, or a presentation folder, all of your print communications should have a similar look and feel. Continually reinforce your brand image in the minds of your customers. 

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

Change is not a threat, it's an opportunity. Survival is not the goal, transformative success is.

Seth Godin

Maximize Your Marketing Dollars with This Simple Tip

It’s a standard rule of thumb in marketing. It costs 10 times less to keep the customers you have than to generate new ones. This means one of the best uses of your marketing dollars is to maintain customer loyalty. One of the easiest ways to do that is to use customer surveys.

What makes customer surveys so effective?

• They make customers feel valued.
• They provide an opportunity to learn about customer habits and purchasing patterns.
• If there is a problem with the customer relationship, they open the door to correct it.

How often should you survey? Some marketers survey their customers on an as-needed basis. Their goal might be to understand different customer behaviors, such as a drop in sales or a shift in purchasing patterns, or to get to know their customers better in order to drive 1:1 personalization programs. Others have an ongoing commitment to customer surveys, such as sending annual questionnaires “just because” or follow-ups after each sale to monitor customer satisfaction.

Regardless of which approach works best for you, customer surveys are a valuable tool for maintaining the loyalty of those customers who help your bottom line the most.

Need to send a customer survey? Ask us! We can help. 

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

Winners don't wait for chances, they take them.

Unknown

Tear-Off Cards Make Responses Easy

Do you include tear-off response cards or other forms in your direct marketing pieces? If so, do you send them blank? Or do you pre-fill them with readily available information (recipient’s name, address, product serial numbers, seminar dates) to make responses as easy as possible?

If you are sending blank forms, you are leaving money on the table. Why? Because the more steps recipients must take to respond to your offer, the less likely they are to do it. Conversely, the easier you make it for them to respond, the more likely they are to do it.

Take the example of one marketer that had been promoting its customer education seminars with a self-mailer that included the dates and details of upcoming workshops. The mailers included a detachable reply card for registration. After more than two years, however, most of the registrations were still coming through the company’s website or sales reps, not the direct mailers it was paying for.

The marketer decided to switch gears. It freshened up the design and moved to a heavier coated stock. It also ditched its static response forms and began pre-filling them so all that recipients had to do was add the stamp and drop the cards in the mail. The company received such a bump in its registrations that it had to add an extra seminar session!

If you are sending reply cards, there is no reason not to pre-fill them. After all, the data you need is most likely in your marketing database already, and we have the skills and the equipment to make the entire process easy for you.

Want to get a quick and easy boost to your response rates? Talk to us about prefilling the response forms and reply cards in your next print campaign!

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

“I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars — I look for 1-foot bars that I can step over.” —Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway chairman and CEO

High-Performing Companies Focus on Personalization

What makes a high-performing company a high-performing company? According to a survey of more than 1,000 marketers, it’s a focus on personalizing customer experiences and using metrics to drive the creation of their creative.

According to Adobe’s “Digital Roadblocks: 2014,” when asked about their most important success factors, marketers gave the following answers:

·        Their CEO understands marketing (73%)

·        Marketing is becoming more important to their company (81%)

·        They are “completely” or “very” focused on personalizing customer experiences (63%)

·        Data (metrics from ads, campaigns, website, and so on) is “strongly informative” in evolving their marketing creative (28%)

Great marketing doesn’t just happen. It’s a strategic effort that involves creative, commitment, and effective use of data. Great marketing also starts with a commitment from the top. Just ask the best marketers around.

Need help combining elements of personalization and metrics-driven creative in producing your next print or multichannel campaign? Give us a call!

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

Charles Darwin

What Motivates Charitable Giving?

If you are a nonprofit, you know how critical direct mail is to your fundraising efforts. But do you know what motivates your donors to give (or not)?

Most nonprofits might say that the most important factor is having a personal connection to the charity or to the recipient of the donation. But according to YouGov’s “Giving Report 2013,” it’s trust.  

When asked the biggest factor that motivates them to donate,

·         12% of those giving to charities cited “trusting a charity/nonprofit”;

·         8% cited “seeing a child, adult, or animal which will directly benefit from my gift”; and

·         6% cited “easily seeing exactly how and where my money will be spent.”

The single biggest deterrent to giving? Inflated salaries and excessive administrative expenses followed uncertainty about how the money would be spent.

Next time you send out a fundraiser, think through the issues of trust and personal connection carefully. How can you tweak your message so that it focuses not just on the mission of your organization but any projects you might be working on? Also work in issues related to trust. While donors want to know how their money will be spent, only 3% said that “easily being able to do their own due diligence” was a motivator for giving a donation. It’s up you to get that message across.

Need help planning your next giving campaign? Give us a call!

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

We make a living by what we get.  We make a life by what we give.

Winston Churchill

“Make It Easy for Me to Buy”

Want to boost responses to your marketing campaigns? Here is a simple tip. Tell people what you want them to do and make it easy for them to do it.

One of the most common mistakes marketers make, especially in direct mail, is burying the offer or forgetting to include a call to action. So get it out there. Every direct mailer or direct marketing piece should contain the following three elements:

1. The offer. What do you want people to do? Make a purchase? Call for a free consultation? Ask for the free information kit?

2. The call to action. Don’t assume people will know what you want them to do. Ask them to request a brochure, call for a free appointment, or sign up by scanning a QR Code.   

3. Response mechanism. Make it easy to respond. If you are asking them to send away for more information, prefill the BRC with their name, addresses, and other information. If you want them to make a phone call, put the phone number to call in larger font or in a different color so it’s easy to find.

Assume that your audience is busy and you only have a few minutes of their time. Within just a few seconds of scanning the piece, they should know what you are selling, what action you want them to take, and how to do it.

Need help? Give us a call! 

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

The new source of power is not money in the hands of a few, but information in the hands of many. – John Naisbitt

Some Customers Still Hard to Reach by Email

Did you know that, even in today’s multichannel media environment, some customer segments are more difficult to reach by email than others? For example . . .

• 41% of U.S. consumers aged 65+ still do not have Internet access.
• 53% of U.S. consumers in this group do not have broadband.
• 18% of these consumers do not have smartphones.[1]

Particularly for older retirees in lower income households, print remains a critical part of the multichannel mix. For many, it may be the only way to reach them. Even those who do go online may require text-only emails rather than the HTML versions many marketers are geared up to send.

But before you write off U.S. retirees as non-email-reading, non-Internet using consumers, remember that not all consumer segments look the same. In fact, among younger, more affluent, and more educated retirees, 90% have Internet access and 82% have broadband. That’s higher than the U.S. adult population overall. For this segment, email is an important tool for marketing communication, both as a primary means of messaging or as a follow-up to print communications.

So before you reach out, know your audience, their media use, and their channel preferences. It can have a critical impact on your multichannel mix.

Need help figuring it out? Give us a call.

---

[1] Pew Research Center (April 2014)

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

Winston Churchill

5 Direct Mail “Must Dos”

Want to ensure that your direct mail is in line with today’s best practices? Here are 5 items that should be on every marketer’s “must do” list.

1. Focus on relevance, not volume: Marketers are moving away from commoditized, undifferentiated direct mail. They are leveraging customer demographics, purchase patterns, and preferences to increase response rates and drive revenue growth. According to a March 2014 study from Adobe,[1] “personalization” ranked #1 on marketers’ lists of priorities this year.

2. Sometimes less is more: By focus on creating relevance, not volume, this often means smaller, more targeted mailings. Only with personalized, relevance-based marketing can you mail less and get more.

3. Think efficiency: Better data cleansing and updating of mailing lists (eliminating UAA, or “undeliverable as addressed” mail) not only increases marketing efficiency, but it saves on postage, too.

4. Use triggered mail: Marketing effectiveness increases when you are mailing at the very time the customer is ready to buy. “Triggered” messaging does just that. Take an automotive manufacturer that sends out 1:1 mailers to alert customers when their vehicles are due for scheduled maintenance based on their last service call. Or a florist that advertises discounts to customers with family members with birthdays or anniversaries that week. Triggered mail magnifies the impact of personalization.

5. Be willing to stretch yourself: Don’t get stuck in a rut. In the same Adobe study, 54% of marketers said they believe the ideal marketer should take more risks and 45% hope to take more risks themselves. How will you know what works best for you if you don’t stretch yourself by trying something new once in awhile?

Talk to us about new ideas and new techniques for personalizing, using triggers, and increasing the relevance of your campaigns to boost your results.

¹ “Digital Roadblock: Marketers Struggle to Reinvent Themselves” (Adobe, March 2014)

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

Persistence can change failure into extraordinary achievement.

Matt Biondi

Can 1:1 Printing Save You Money? Yes!

Most marketers define the success of a print marketing campaign in terms of what they gain — responses, conversions, or dollars flowing into the cash register. But you can also define success by the money you save. Let’s look at three ways 1:1 printing can improve the bottom line through cost savings, not just boosting responses and revenues.  

1. Lower cost of attrition. If your goal is to prevent customer attrition, you can evaluate the success of your campaign based on what sales stay rather than what sales merely come in. One marketer of high-end vacations saved millions, for example, by sending vacationers 100% personalized booklets that reinforce their vacation choices. Its cancellation rates plummeted, and it kept customer sales where they belonged — in its pockets.

2. Less handholding. What if you could use 1:1 printing to reduce calls to your customer service team? Questions about invoicing and payment cost real money. By personalizing its tax letters, for example, one state government’s tax bureau made these letters easier to read. The result was a noticeable drop in calls to its call centers, and the state saved hundreds of thousands of dollars.

3. Faster response times. The faster customers pay, the better your cash flow. Take the example above. By using personalized printing to make its statements easier to read, this state government not only reduced the number of taxpayer calls, but it started receiving its revenues days earlier. As a result, it significantly boosted its earnings from interest.

Not included in this case study but very real to most marketers is the fact that more on-time payments also mean less time and money spent on duplicate invoicing and follow-up calls for non-payment.

Reducing customer attrition and making their invoices and customer statements easier to read and understand are not the “sexy” benefits of 1:1 printing we hear about the most, but they are real, bottom-line benefits that do not get talked about enough!

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

It's not the will to win that matters--everyone has that.  It's the will to prepare to win that matters.

Paul "Bear" Bryant

3 Ways to Measure Success

It is always critical to quantify the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. But how do you define success? Particularly with 1:1 printing, you have to use the right yardstick. If you are like most marketers, you might be used to thinking in terms of response rates, but let’s look at three less commonly used (but more critical) metrics to keep in mind.

1. Cost per lead. Typically, marketers are used to thinking about cost per piece, and with traditional direct mail in the $.10 range, it’s hard for 1:1 print marketing to compete on a cost basis. But everything changes when you look at what your program costs per lead rather than per piece.

If you mail 100,000 postcards at $.25 each (including postage), that’s a project cost of $25,000. If that campaign achieves a 1% response rate, that’s 250 leads at a cost of $100 per lead. On the other hand, if you mail 25,000 1:1 postcards at a cost of $1.00 each, that is still a project cost of $25,000. But if you achieve a 12% response rate, that’s 3,000 leads. Now your cost per lead drops to $8.33!

2. Cost per sale. Not all leads translate into sales. Divide the number of people who actually make a purchase into your total costs and this will give you the cost per sale. If only 33% of respondents to these hypothetical campaigns make a purchase, your cost per sale is $300 for the static campaign, while for the 1:1 campaign, it is $25.00.

3. Lifetime customer value. The value of the sale often goes beyond the initial purchase. If 1:1 personalization woos the buyer of one make of car to another, and if that customer becomes loyal to that brand, the return on investment from that piece includes the value of every car purchased by that customer over his or her lifetime. This is an important metric for marketers of long-term purchases, such as automobiles, financial products, and insurance.

The bottom line? Before you measure your results in any print campaign, make sure you understand all of the available measuring sticks, then use the one(s) that are the most impactful for you. 

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development 

I am certainly not one of those who need to be prodded.  In fact, if anything, I am the prod.

Winston Churchhill

I am certainly not one of those who need to be prodded. In fact, if anything, I am the prod.

Winston Churchill

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_business.html#p5G9J4b746sIO9eJ.99

Multi-Channel Leads Marketers’ Strategies

If you like multi-channel marketing, here is some good news. According to a survey conducted by WoodWing Software, you’re about to get more of it.

In a survey of publishers, advertising agencies, and in-house marketing departments, WoodWing found that in terms of their marketing mix, 59% favor a combination of print, web, mobile, tablet, and social media.  

Which channels do publishers look to first?

·        22% favor a print-first strategy

·        6% favor a web-first strategy

·        5% favor a mobile-first approach

·        2% favor a social-media-first strategy

Respondents’ main reasons for using social media? Brand awareness. When it comes to communicating the marketing message, however, print remains king.

Why does print remain the dominant form of marketing? Perhaps for a reason no more complicated than people still like going to the mailbox. Unlike email inboxes, which can fill up with hundreds of emails in a single day, the mailbox delivers a handful of mail that most people enjoy sorting through. It’s like a treasure hunt. You never know what’s in there.

Unlike an email subject line, envelopes deliver interest and engagement before they are even opened. Colors, windows, and on-envelope messaging and personalization all offer forms of engagement. Then there are the benefits of other mailing formats, such as postcards, trifold mailers, and three-dimensional mail, which offer even more engagement.

The takeaway? For best results, use social media for branding. Tap into email for reminders, follow-ups, and short-term offers. But keep print as the foundation and bedrock of your marketing. 

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

It's good sportsmanship to not pick up lost golf balls while they are still rolling.

Mark Twain

Using the “Describe and Predict” Model

Want to knock your 1:1 (personalized) printing campaign out of the park? Do more than personalize the document. Use your data to describe and predict.

The process starts with understanding what your customers look like. Do a basic database analysis. What is their mix of ages, incomes, genders, and races? Where do they live? Then filter this customer information through general demographic and psychographic patterns to predict their behavior. Let’s look at a simplified example.

Say you are an auto dealership and discover that your lease customers fall into three basic categories: young singles, families, and retirees.

Because these are all current customers, you know their ages, incomes and ages of their children (if any) at the time of initial lease. You know their current vehicles and the options selected. This allows you to match appropriate upsells and cross-sells based on the likely needs of each group.

• In the young singles category, for example, it would be reasonable to assume that, after five years, they might have higher earning power. At the end of a five-year lease, you might be able to trade them up to the next class of vehicle with more options.
• In the families with young children category, you might assume that, after five years, they might have had more children. If they currently lease a sedan, they might need to move into something larger like a minivan or crossover vehicle. Families with older children might need to move into a vehicle with greater towing and storage capacity.
• In the retiree category, customers might be looking to downsize. Those with higher levels of disposable income might be looking for sportier cars or luxury vehicles.

In all cases, you know when the customer will act—at the end of the lease period. This information in hand, you can craft marketing campaigns with appropriate messages, offers and incentives.

Your customer base might look different than the one described here, of course, but you can use this process against your own customer mix. Just remember the letters “d” and “p”: describe, then predict.

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

Don't measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability.

John Wooden

Best Practices in 1:1 Printing

If you want great marketing results, it’s important to personalize text, images, and other content based on what you know about the recipient. But just dropping in data-driven content doesn’t guarantee success. Sometimes other factors can dull your results. Maybe the offer is great, but the design is so uninteresting that nobody reads it. Or the headline is snappy and the design is great, but there is no incentive for people to respond.

Let’s look at three best practices that need to be the foundation of any 1:1 print marketing campaign.

• Traditional marketing rules apply. 1:1 might be personalized marketing, but traditional rules hold firm. Ultimately, all of the elements — creative, message (including personalization), offer, segmentation, call to action, and incentive —need to come together to determine success. 
• Focus on relevance, not “personalization.” It doesn’t matter how “personalized” a document is. If it isn’t relevant, it is worthless. Take the shoe market. Clearly, you don’t want to market orthopedic shoes to teenagers. You can deck out the mailer with text messaging terms, pictures of X-Games, and use all the contemporary lingo, but it’s not a relevant message unless a teen needs to purchase a birthday present for grandpa.
• Know your customers, then market to what you know. When the National Hockey League began 1:1 communication with its customers, it asked them to fill out a survey that indicated that 40% of the of NHL’s fan base lives outside their favorite team’s home market. That means these fans can’t easily go to games or access highlights. Imagine the opportunity for the league! So ask yourself, what don’t you know about your customers now that might allow you to create relevance in a more powerful way later? Do a customer mail or email survey. Use what you find out to speak directly to the needs and interests of your customers.

Investing in your marketing database and developing an intimate understanding of your customers takes time, dedicated resources, and manpower, but it is one of the most important investments you can make. Personalization is a powerful tool, but to get the big pay-off, it cannot work alone.

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all time thing. You don’t win once in a while, you don’t do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.

Vince Lombardi

Setting Expectations for Personalized Print

There is not doubt — we love personalized print. We love it because it works. What’s important, however, is understanding why it works. Personalized print doesn’t boost response rates simply because it’s driven by data.

When you look at the case studies and Webinars for these campaigns, you will often see phenomenal response rates.  In one report, they ranged from 6% to 75%, with an average of 21%. These are some powerful numbers. However, in order to understand why and how individual campaigns achieve such high numbers and whether yours is likely to do the same, you need to ask certain questions.

• What was the application? Different applications tend to bring different response rates.
• What kind of mailing list did the marketer start with? Highly targeted, moderately targeted, or undifferentiated lists will yield different results.
• Did recipients have a previous relationship with the company?
• What is the value of the product?
• Did per-order value go up with personalization, and if so, by how much?
• How is the marketer evaluating success (on a campaign-by-campaign basis or lifetime customer value)?

The answers to such questions can have a dramatic impact on ROI. For example, if you are asking respondents to log into a personalized URL to fill out a survey or provide information to a company they already do business with, you can expect higher response rates than if you are doing a prospecting campaign.

So before setting your expectations for your next personalized print mailing, talk to us about your goals, your expectations, and the data you are working with. Setting realistic expectations is a critical component to making your 1:1 print program a success.

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

If you try to do something and fail, you are vastly better off than if you had tried nothing and succeeded

Anonymous

With E-mail, Who Needs Print?

It’s true—e-mail is inexpensive, easy to personalize and highly trackable. The trend however is toward cross media, with marketers using the best of multiple media to reinforce one another. But with the success of e-mail, some marketers might be tempted to jettison print altogether. Is this the right choice?

As you allocate your marketing resources, here are some things to consider.

1. Differences in e-mail databases. People change e-mail addresses more frequently than they do physical addresses. Thus, you must keep e-mail addresses up to date much more often, especially in the B2B marketplace. Data mining experts indicate that predictive analysis also tends to be more accurate for direct mail than for e-mail, and customer retention rates tend to be higher.

2. Direct mail tends to generate higher revenues. Although there are exceptions, more multi-media campaigns include e-mail as a marketing component than direct mail (79.1% for e-mail vs. 75.4% for direct mail). However, direct mail generated 29% of the revenue, compared to 21.6% for e-mail.

3. Print mail sticks around. The 1:1 industry abounds with stories of marketers who send out smart personalized campaigns, and while recipients to the campaign might not need the product or service immediately, they keep the mailer for future reference. They might wait for a year or more, but when they are ready, they act on it. When was the last time you heard that about an e-mail?

Perhaps this is why, despite the proliferation of e-mail, direct mail continues to grow.

So don’t over-emphasize e-mail to the exclusion of print . When evaluating the metrics of both options, compare apples to apples. Put more weight on measurements, such as cost per lead, dollars generated per sale and ROI than on more generic measurements. You might find that the most cost-effective solution isn’t always what it might seem.

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

There are no secrets to success.  It is the result of preparation, hard work and learning from failure.

Colin Powell

Old Trail Printing wins 17 awards for Print Excellence

Old Trail Printing is proud to announce it was recently awarded seventeen (17) 2014 Print Excellence Awards from the Printing Industries of Ohio / N. Kentucky.

Printing Industries Association President, Jim Cunningham stated how impressed this year’s judges were with the overall quality of all of the entries.  “Paul and Glenn are experienced judges and printers whose combined expertise spans more than 75 years of print.  Yet, even they were impressed with our members’ incredible work.  It’s easy in today’s fast paced world to just get the job done, but our Association members continue to demonstrate the pride and dedication to their craft that has made Ohio and northern Kentucky printers some of the best in the world!”

Each year, Printing Industries of Ohio / N. Kentucky holds its Print Excellence Awards Competition to reward Ohio and northern Kentucky printers that demonstrate excellence in 34 categories.  This year member companies submitted over 500 printed pieces and two out-of-state expert judges ranked them in a regional competition.  This year’s judges were Paul Schmitz, Schmitz Printing Inc. and Glenn Petry.

Each of the gold award winners in the regional competition are entered in an association-wide competition for Best of Category and Best of Show prizes that will be awarded in September 2014 at the Grand Ceremony being held in Columbus, Ohio.

Old Trail Printing won the following awards:

            11 Gold Awards

            6 Silver Awards

Founded in 1928 and one of the largest woman owned printers in the Midwest, Old Trail Printing has a rich history of servicing clients across the country. Our combination of offset and digital presses means we have the right equipment to handle a variety of projects. In addition to being recognized as an award winning printer, we have invested in technology tools that enable our customers to streamline their procurement processes, increase efficiencies, reduce waste and gain a higher return on investment with their printed communications. With our comprehensive list of services our customers benefit from using Old Trail as their single source for creative, printing, mailing, fulfillment and more.

Printing Industries of Ohio / N.Kentucky serves nearly 300 commercial printing companies and suppliers to the industry in its service area. The Association provides a broad range of products and services to its membership, including workers’ compensation and product discounts. Printing Industries of Ohio / N.Kentucky is an affiliate of the national Printing Industries of America, the largest graphic arts association in the world. For complete information on Printing Industries of Ohio / N.Kentucky and Printing Industries of America, please visit www.pianko.org.  

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”  

 Maya Angelou